I was like…?????? Sure I know lip gloss, liquid liner, cream, and the other familiar girl things. But that was the first time I heard of bronzer, colorstay; and what’s a Bb cream? And what do they mean by “power perfection”? Sounds impressive though, like the product can turn you into a goddess whatsoever, or a Galadriel (Cate Blanchett, The Lord of the Rings).

Out of some pesky curiosity of why I don’t have those girl stuff, and in the very first place, why they seem new to me, I took out my own purse to see what have I got for my “lady-hood.”

So I got myself:

a spray hand sanitizer

a gel hand sanitizer

a lip balm

a kiddie toothbrush

a tiny toothpaste

[something like] a hair twiner

a lip gloss

a pair of tweezers

a dental floss

a face mirror

a hair tie

Then, I wondered if I’m being girl enough. My vanity purse sure lacks the sense of “lady-hood” it’s supposed to possess, but thanks a lot anyway to that knickknack on top of the bag itself. It’s so South Korea, thanks to my previous boss! 🙂

But then I realized (so there’s the cliche, hahaha), makeup is not really my thing, and I mean, not at all. I don’t want them, first of all. Of course, I tried keeping and using some, but they barely held my attention. I do adore dolled up faces because they really are beautiful…oftentimes, stunning! But me sparing at least a quarter of an hour for makeup? Never mind. I better water my lonely euphorbia, Bella, and make coffee and slice some cheese, or take a few photos of my table’s centerpiece.

But then again, am I girl enough? Because my vanity purse tells me I’m not, but I want to tell it, “Let’s not burden ourselves with what we don’t want. Be happy with what you carry for me, because they are what I want, and you make sense to me.” 😀

Never would’ve realized these things if I, for once or twice, did not get irritated with myself asking these questions over and over again. 🙂

1. What to wear tomorrow? When I get home from work, I don’t usually spend a while longer in my office clothes slash outfit of the day. Of course, they’re already dirty with soot and sweat. So by the time I change for bed clothes, that’s also the minute I start figuring out what to wear the next day. Slacks? Skirt? Dress? What colors am I going for? Heels? Flats? How about the hair-do? And all that outfit shits. It’s both exciting and frustrating; frustrating when I’ve already gone drowsy and I still haven’t figured it out. Then in the morning, I wake up to panic for not having decided what to wear. So I rush to my outrageous heap of clothes, rummage for a good matching outfit, and that takes me…well…a good deal of time, which in such case is bad. And if I spend a little more time rummaging, I’d arrive in the office at 9:02. Two minutes late! Phew. (Thought: Blame the traffic, not me. HAHAHA!)

2. Have I got enough coins for my bus fare? I should know better now how precious it is to be able to find a seat in the bus on your way to work. Otherwise, you have the right to remain standing all throughout the ride rich in “inertia moments” – those sudden brakes that pull you to that stranger in front and bang your head against his bag; and then push you to another stranger behind and you have to say, “Sorry”. Awful.

For that, I make sure I got my both hands to pin me in place the whole time. So before I leave home, I also make sure I have enough coins to pay my exact fare. Not bills because I don’t have an extra hand to take my change and toss it in my coin purse and dunk it into my bag.

3. What to eat for lunch? What time can I eat lunch? I always wonder what time exactly I can eat my lunch. It’s irritatingly amazing how blood red flags and deadlines can keep you pinned down in your station. Bad thing is that the canteen is way down the ground floor. Then you get to look at the bottom-right corner of your monitor, it’s already 3:00 PM; worse, 4:00 PM. Happy lunch, yeeeaah! 🙂

4. I’m not gonna be late for work, am I? Well, I worry about this everyday, starting when I’m halfway through the travel, or oftentimes when I’m just about to grab my bag and go. As calculated, I have to leave home at 7:45 to 7:50 AM. But because of #1 (What to wear) and this unnecessarily long time in the bath, I often take off at 8:00 to 8:10. It’s not like I’ve wasted thirty minutes but when you know traffic is readily waiting to welcome your day, five minutes is just so damn precious!

5. Where to find a pretty dead twig for my soda bottle vase? An unnecessary worry, fine. But because everytime I open the cupboard I see my empty Sola bottle stripped off of its label, I then start to mentally tour around the neighborhood and scout for a pretty dead twig that looks rustic enough to match our apartment’s intended interior. When I go out to buy food, groceries, whatsoever, I look around for this pretty dead twig but so far always unfortunate.

6. MY LAUNDRYYYY!!! When will I ever run out of dirty clothes??? I don’t need to explain this, right? I don’t usually put off doing my laundry but it’s just awfully unbeatable! Good Lord.

Now, if I think of it, at twenty-something, I still think nonsense…a lot. 🙂

Of 24 hours, how much do you spend thinking, worrying, daydreaming, and ranting over your unrelentingly stressful job? Your office period is a given, minus the 30 minutes you spend on YouTube, some two to three hours stalking and chatting on Facebook and Twitter, and like an hour or two “google-ing” for the latest cool gadget by Apple and Samsung or for the difference between cold perm and digital perm, yada-ya-DUH. And of course, minus the time you’re DEEPLY (yes, I have to say that) sleeping.

It must be that life-sucker kind of job that most of us are unwillingly trying to get through with day by day…or night by night. Really, how long does it take you to pull your butt off your messy-but-irresistibly-caring bed; and to the shower? As for me, at least these days, one hour! LOL. Like today, I would’ve missed the entire morning and wasted it to tardiness had my brother not bothered waking me up.

You open your eyes. Work. You get up. Work. Oh, and before that, perhaps you were dreaming of your To-Dos. Take a shower. To-Dos. Pick your outfit. To-Dos. Eat breakfast. To-Dos. Dab some lip tint. To-Dos. Wait for a bus. To-Dos. Then you mentally talk yourself through the traffic about your To-Dooosss. Priority 1. Priority 2, 3…….*toooooot*…….4, 5. You take the elevator. Deadlines. You open the door to your office. Deadlines. Boot up your computer. Deadlines. And then you open your email inbox……..(Brain NOT Responding).

At the end of the day, you log off three hours past your regular timeout. So you take the elevator down with puffy eyebags. To-Dos. You wait for the bus. Pending items. You ride the bus. Hate mails from your boss. You take the shower. Crappy outputs.

Then you pray. I do! 🙂 And in my prayers, I always thank God for entrusting the job to me. It’s hard, so damn hard, that goes without saying. But then again, I am learning a lot and that alone is one huge scoop of some perks. I thank God for making me get through the love-hate affair of every day, and through an inbox that I would’ve wished to empty right at first sight. And for everything else because I believe that each and every day always has some goodness and some sane humanity in it.

Sure, there’s a sensical point in not having to mourn over and regret the mistakes we’ve made, the intentional ones especially. But whatever the point is, it kind of bothers me. Do we really NOT have to regret them?

I don’t know. Only that I’ve come to realize that it’s somehow scary to not regret your mistakes at all. It’s like you never fear them – not even for once – nor the possibility of committing them again.

I understand, we don’t want to regret the bad days that accounted for the lessons we had to learn from our pasts. It would seem like brushing off the morals we’ve gained from the shame and the blame. Or like cursing the selves we’ve become after pulling it through the acceptance of our mishaps and misdeeds.

But personally, I’d rather regret my mistakes. Not immediately; perhaps just after every one of them has pressed its sensical point into me.

And perhaps, that’s what we’ve been meaning to say: we don’t regret our mistakes for what we learned from them. “Experience is the best teacher,” they say. But if we come to the point where we’d decide not to do the same mistakes, we must have regretted them and have learned to fear them, that we wouldn’t want anything to do with those mistakes again.

We do curse our mistakes and we even fear them, I believe so. Only that we don’t have to regret them right at the start because we have to squeeze out the lessons first. But again, eventually, we will have to regret them because we have to fear them, because we don’t want to do them again.

No biggie! This is just how I feel about my biggest mistake, and I think I just got the hang of regretting it. 😉